(December 25, 2016 at 8:04 am)bennyboy Wrote: The atomic number of gold could be 79 whether the world is an expression only of your forgotten self, of the Mind of God, of the Matrix, or of an existential framework which really includes space.Sure, I'm open to any of those possibilities that are sufficiently interesting or compelling.
(December 25, 2016 at 8:04 am)bennyboy Wrote: Nevertheless the 79-ness of gold is, so far as you are concerned, imagined; this is because the experience is not dependent on the reality of the object underlying it. If I have a dream in which my mother is consistently either a unicorn or a monkey, and if this experience persists long enough and convincingly enough, I may infer that in that context, it is possible to have a person who is a unicorn-monkey.I don't know how you can resist what seems to me to be an untenable slide into solipsism, given this view.
So the consistency of experiences, even the convergence from what seem to be multiple sources (a textbook, a professor, direct observation), does not usefully inform us about where those experiences come from, if anywhere. Rather, they set a context in which we can function meaningfully-- apples always, in my experience, fall when dropped-- and I can use that fact in my ongoing exploration of what it is like to be me.
He who loves God cannot endeavour that God should love him in return - Baruch Spinoza